The final hour - Metaphors on life and world history in works of Jacob Burckhardt and Wilhelm Dilthey

It is only the final hour of a life that reveals its value-this antique not ion underwent a remarkable modification in 19th century historical thought: "sense" and "meaning," too, are from now on supposed to be constituted ret rospectively. The use of the lifetime allegory puts historians like Burckha rdt and Dilthey into a quandary, which one of them tries to escape from by a dialectical, respectively hermeneutical model of historical understanding and the other by an anamnestic concept of historical thought.